Digital Product Passport and Interoperability

The Digital Product Passport requires access to all relevant data as well as the“semantic interconnection”of this data within a company. In addition, interconnection with external data from suppliers and partners is also necessary. This interoperability— which also supports the exchange of digital twins—can be achieved through the use of the open Asset Administration Shell standard (IEC 63278-1). Furthermore, full interoperability requires seamless integration with existing business processes and models within the company—for example, in product engineering and model-based system engineering—as well as the orchestration of relationships at the data, model, and process levels. Model-based methods and descriptions (BPMN 2.0, SysML v2, AutoML, LLM, Predictive Maintenance) are already in use in many areas of the enterprise. The complete interconnection of these complex relationships and aspects can be achieved using a semantic enterprise model based on web standards (W3C), thereby contributing to further value creation within the company.

Note: I gave this presentation in November 2025 at the tekom Annual Conference (Arena) in Stuttgart.

Digital Transformation and Cognitive Computing

Digital transformation refers to a comprehensive process of change based on the application of new digital technologies and agile approaches, which affects all areas and processes of a company or institution.

In the context of the application and integration of digital technologies, the term “cognitive computing” is also used, which is based on solutions from the fields of knowledge discovery, text mining, natural language processing, and machine learning.

The ability to adapt to changing conditions and information, as well as the systematic learning capability of all components—along with the ability to take the context of application into account—are the most important capabilities of cognitive computing.

Digital transformation (just like any knowledge management transformation) must take into account all areas of a company or institution; transforming technology alone is not enough (e.g., the organization, employees, processes, strategy—see“Core Elements of Digital Transformation”for more on this).